Curtain falls for film director Schlesinger

July 27 2003
The Sun-Herald

Oscar-winning British director John Schlesinger died in a Palm Springs hospital on Friday after a career that tackled sexual taboos in such films as Sunday Bloody Sunday and Midnight Cowboy and helped to end a cinematic age of innocence.

Schlesinger, 77, who suffered a debilitating stroke more than two years ago, was taken off life support on Thursday and died early on Friday, publicist Ronni Chasen said.

The director helped to make stars of such actors as Alan Bates, Julie Christie, Tom Courtenay, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. A homosexual, he also figured as a key figure in the emergence of gay-themed cinema.

"Shakespeare said it best in Hamlet, 'We will never see the likes of him again'," Hoffman said on Friday.

Schlesinger suffered a stroke in 2000 after making his last feature film, The Next Best Thing with Madonna. It was a critical flop. ");document.write("

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"I think John knew it was time to go," biographer William Mann said. "He was confined to a wheelchair and he wasn't able to speak for much of those last couple of years. But he was still learning and observing life, and I think he finally knew he had finished the journey."

Richard Gere, who starred in Yanks, described the director as "an original".

"John's string of films in the 1960s and 1970s are as astonishingly good as any film made anytime, anywhere . . . audacious, challenging, irascible, moving, witty, wise and deeply personal," Gere said.

The son of a London doctor, he started making home movies at the age of 11, He made a dramatic Hollywood debut in 1969 with Midnight Cowboy.

The wrenching tale of an unlikely friendship between a stud and a homeless con man on the steamier side of New York became the first movie originally X-rated to win an Oscar for best picture. It also won a best-director Oscar for Schlesinger.

Schlesinger used it as a springboard for an even edgier drama, Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), that dealt in frank terms with the triangle of a bisexual man, his older gay lover and his mistress and featured one of the screen's first same-sex kisses.

Social taboos and gritty realism were familiar territory for Schlesinger, who described Sunday Bloody Sunday as largely autobiographical.

He made his first feature film in 1962 with A Kind of Loving, which explored love in the new cinematic territory of working-class northern Britain. This was followed by Billy Liar (1963). His third feature, Darling (1965), made a star of Julie Christie and earned three Oscars.

Other films in his impressive filmography were Marathon Man and Falcon and the Snowman.